The garden erupted.
A hundred heroes moved as one, and Damien understood in the first three seconds that this was not going to be like anything he'd faced before. These weren't Dungeon Rexs built from wood or drowned water or absorbed flesh. These were people who had spent lifetimes — real, human lifetimes.... learning exactly how to kill things stronger than themselves.
He killed the first one without meaning to enjoy it, and didn't.
A swordsman came at him low, blade angled to gut him, and Damien's dagger met his throat before the man finished his second step. The body dropped. Damien didn't look at the face until after, and wished he hadn't. Old. Scarred. The kind of scars a person earned protecting things, not taking them.
He kept moving. He had to.
An archer loosed three arrows in the time it took most men to loose one, each aimed at a different vital point, forcing Damien to choose which to dodge and which to simply take. He took the shoulder. It hurt. He crossed the distance in half a breath and ended it clean.
They came at him in relays after that... a spearman testing his footwork, a pair of twin-blade users who fought in tandem like they shared a single nervous system, a berserker who screamed as he swung a hammer the size of a door. Damien cut them down one at a time, and one at a time, something in his chest tightened a little further.
'They're not monsters. They're heroes. Every single one of them.....And here i am...Killing them.....I'm gonna fucking destroy this unknown person...I swear it'
He didn't stop.
Then the Fianna Knights closed around him, and the fight changed shape entirely.
Twenty of them, spears and swords and one woman with twin daggers who moved like she'd trained her whole life just to mirror him, and they didn't fight like twenty people. They fought like one organism with twenty limbs. Damien drove a blade toward an opening on his left and found three spears already converging on the space he'd have to retreat into. He shifted right and two more closed that gap before he'd even finished the thought. Their formation had no seams. No hesitation. No single point where one fighter's mistake became his opportunity, because none of them ever made a mistake alone...the others simply absorbed it and kept moving.
He tried shadow first, lashing tendrils toward the formation's edges. They parted around it like water and closed again the instant it passed.
He tried speed. They matched it, not individually, but as a unit.... falling back in disciplined rings, buying time, feeding fresh spears into the front while the tired ones rotated clear.
For a long, grinding stretch of the fight, Damien could not find the seam.
They fought as one person, even though they were twenty
It took him breaking the geometry of it... flooding the entire courtyard floor with shadow spikes all at once, not aimed at any single fighter but at the space the formation needed to breathe in.... before the wall finally cracked. Once it cracked, it came apart fast, brutally fast, twenty trained soldiers reduced in under a minute to twenty bodies on frozen stone. He killed the last one.... the woman with the twin daggers.... looking her in the eye, because it felt wrong not to.
He didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say.
Fulland Howls found him a moment later, and for the first time since the garden had erupted, Damien felt something close to genuine excitement cut through the grief sitting in his chest.
Dine moved first... water coiling from the spirit's small floating form into shielding arcs, deflecting, redirecting, buying Fulland the half-second openings he needed. In raw power, Fulland wasn't beyond Ais. Wasn't beyond Alcy, not in their current forms. Damien could feel that clearly enough.
But his swordplay was something else entirely.
Damien found himself, mid-exchange, actually learning.... watching the angle of a parry that shouldn't have worked and understanding, a half-second late, exactly why it had. Fulland fought like every motion was the end result of a thousand small corrections made over a lifetime, no wasted movement anywhere in his form. Damien took a cut across the ribs testing an opening that Fulland had clearly baited him into, and respected the man more for it, not less.
He still won. He had to.
The killing blow came fast and clean, a thrust Damien didn't want to make and made anyway, and Fulland went down without a sound.
Dine caught him.
The spirit cradled Fulland's head in small translucent hands, water rippling like it was trying to hold a shape that was already slipping away, and looked up at Damien.... not with hatred. With something gentler and worse.
"Thank you," Dine said quietly. "For giving him a real fight. He would have hated dying to something weaker."
Damien nodded once, because his throat wouldn't let him do more than that, and turned back to the garden.
By the time the rest fell... one by one, a hundred lives compressed into an hour of falling bodies — only two remained standing among the ruined frost and scattered weapons.
Albert. And Celdia.
Albert looked around at the field, at the fallen who had once been his people, and let out a short, humorless laugh. "I should have brought my entire party here," he said. "Might've actually stood a chance."
"We can take him," Celdia said flatly, ice already gathering along her fingertips.
Albert shrugged, and drew his sword.
Celdia opened with everything at once.... close-range bursts that forced Damien to weave through frost spikes erupting from the stone at his feet, wide arcing spells that boxed him into narrowing lanes of safe ground, every cast timed to land exactly when his guard was lowest. She wasn't just powerful. She was precise, reading his movement half a step ahead every single time, forcing him to burn reaction speed just to stay upright.
And then Albert moved, and Damien understood, for the first time all day, what it actually meant to fight a Hero with a capital letter.
Albert's blade found gaps in his shadow that nothing else had.... not tore through it, but unwove it, light magic threading along the steel's edge and simply dissolving the darkness wherever it touched. Damien felt it happen and didn't quite believe it at first. No one else today had managed that. No one else today had come close.
Albert's sword opened his forearm to the bone.
It healed in seconds, shadow knitting the wound shut almost as fast as it opened.... but the fact that it happened mattered more than the wound itself. Damien was a god. He'd fought Monarchs. He'd erased a Monster Rex from existence an hour ago on the floor above.
And this one man, with a sword and some borrowed light, was making him work.
He was, he realized somewhere in the exchange, genuinely enjoying it.... the specific, terrible joy of finally being tested by something that could actually hurt him.... and hating himself a little for feeling it, because every second this lasted was a second closer to having to end it.
Celdia kept covering him, spell after spell, buying Albert the openings he needed, and Damien understood he couldn't beat them both at once, not cleanly, not without more casualties than he could stomach.
So he stopped trying to.
He let his shadow bleed sideways, thin and unseen beneath the frost, and while Albert's blade came in for another strike, Damien simply wasn't where the strike landed anymore..... he was behind Celdia, rising out of her own shadow before she'd finished tracking where he'd gone.
His dagger found her heart.
"You're the best mage I've ever fought," he told her, quiet, because it felt important that she hear it before the end.
Celdia's lips curved, faint, and something in her golden eyes eased. "That's kind of you to say." She didn't fight it. She let herself fall with something close to grace, and closed her eyes before she hit the ground.
Then it was just the two of them.
Albert didn't rage at losing his last ally. He simply adjusted his stance, sword raised, and met Damien's eyes with something that looked almost like relief.
"Now," he said, "it's just us."
They came together.
Twin short swords against a Hero's blade, a dance too fast for the frozen garden's watching statues to follow, force meeting precision meeting force again. Albert's swordplay was the finest Damien had faced all day... all century, maybe.... every strike carrying the weight of a thousand years of practice compressed into a single unbroken exchange. Damien matched him blow for blow, shadow flaring to cover gaps his daggers couldn't reach fast enough, both of them bleeding, both of them refusing to slow.
It ended on a single thrust.
Damien's blade found the gap Albert's stance had left open for just an instant too long, and drove home, straight through the heart.
Albert's sword fell from his hand.
He staggered back against the garden wall, sliding down it slowly, and Damien was there before he hit the ground, catching him, easing him down instead of letting him fall.
"Relax," Damien said, voice low. "Be calm. It's over."
Albert's breathing came ragged, shallow, wet. Tears slid down his face... not from pain, Damien realized. Something else.
"I wished," Albert whispered, "to see her. Just once more. Ais." His hand found Damien's wrist, gripping weakly. "I should have raised her myself. Watched her grow. Instead I left her. Because I was a hero. Because there was always someone else who needed saving more than my own daughter did."
"No." Damien's voice came out steadier than he felt. "It wasn't like that. Ais loved you. She grew up trying to become you.... everything she is, she built chasing the idea of you. She never spoke one bad word about what you did. Not once." He held Albert's gaze, made sure the words landed. "You never got to raise her yourself. But because of you, hundreds of families kept theirs. You gave them a father, a mother, a home to go back to. That's not nothing, Albert. That's everything."
Albert's eyes closed briefly, and when they opened again, something in them had settled.
"Care for her," he said, each word costing him more than the last. "Please. And tell her...." His breath caught, and for a moment it seemed like he wouldn't manage it. "Tell her I loved her. More than anything I have ever loved. Tell her I wish her nothing but happiness."
Damien nodded, throat too tight to answer with words.
Albert's hand loosened on his wrist.
Damien stayed there a long moment after, kneeling in the frost among a hundred fallen heroes and the man who should have been his father-in-law, and let his eyes close before he finally rose to his feet and left him to rest.
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